The offerings of the righteous are the tears of their eyes, and a sacrifice pleasing to God is their sighings during vigil.
St Isaac of Syria, Directions on Spiritual Training, 206

A theme that pervades much of the prophetic literature of the Old Testament is the priority of moral decency over ritual sacrifice. When we read the ritual requirements of the Mosaic law, we are spontaneously revolted by the shedding of animal blood and the sacrifice of animal flesh to appease a ferocious tribal God. Yet even in this primitive ritual there is the concept of something valuable being dedicated to the Creator, so that the owner is relatively impoverished.

But it becomes all too easy to use material objects as a substitute for inner dedication. As the ancient rabbis knew, God wants the heart. If our earthly gifts are offered in a spirit of genuine devotion, they are pleasing to the Deity, but if they are used as a sort of smoke-screen to hide our basic indifference to holy living, they are thrust back at us in disgust. The smoke-screen does not deceive God, but it can easily create in us a sense of false sanctity. And so a sacrifice wrongly presented can be on the one hand a focus of superstition and on the other a blanket of complacency. The object of sacrifice is made holy by being given to God in love; where this element of self-giving is absent, the gift is a lifeless thing. And so Hosea wrote:

Loyalty is my desire, not sacrifice,
not whole-offerings but the knowledge of God. (Hos. 6.6)

We have to learn, progressively in the school of life, that we ourselves can alone provide a gift to God that is holy, that can in turn renew the lives of those around us. These include, in the final judgement, all that is created by God.

The supreme sacrifice, in Christian understanding, is the self-giving death of Jesus on the cross. He atones for the collective sin of humanity by reconciling a vicious world to divine love, which now flows out in pure grace to all who will receive it. Through the influence of the Risen Lord, whose body is now one with the eternal light of God, humanity itself is brought to that light in preparation for its own transfiguration. And so the words of Psalm 51.17 become intensely real:

My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit;
a wounded heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.

It is only then that material sacrifice attains reality, whether of animals as in the Psalmist's time (Ps. 51.19), or of money and other possessions later on. Here we can remember the widow's mite at the Temple treasury, which was preferred by Jesus to the much larger donations of the wealthy worshippers: she gave of herself, while the others gave merely of their excess (Mark 12.41-4).

With these thoughts we can proceed to St Isaac's emphasis on contrition being a nobler sacrifice to God than anything on a more material level. When the righteous cry, they give of their very essence to God, even the sins which would usually be concealed from their closest brethren. It is a thought that even the greatest gift we may offer God - and all gifts come from him to us, who are then expected to use them and bring back something beautiful to him from our labours and sufferings - is as nothing compared with the gift of ourselves, even soiled and revolting in the world's eyes. This is the measure of love, the supreme gift of God and our full sacrifice to our fellows and the world. It is this that we offer our Lord at the end of the day as we proceed to fall, like little children, into a sleep of oblivion that carries us forward for the encounters of the next day.

Even when we are soiled and dispirited, we at least prove that we have shared in the world's strife, even if not especially creditably. The righteous are not some remote spiritual elite who grace the world by their presence; we are they when we give our uncleanness to God in simple faith.

May I have the honesty, Lord, to face my sinfulness, the humility to offer it to you as my sacrifice, and the faith to proceed even when little outward change appears to bless my life. Instead, may I give of myself unceasingly to the less fortunate members of the community.